The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics)

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Linlithgow, July 1857

  We then went to a bookseller’s shop and bought some views of Stirling and the neighborhood; and it is surprising what a quantity and variety of engravings there are of every noted place that we have visited. At two booksellers’ shops, you seldom find two sets alike. It is rather nauseating to find that what you came to see has already been viewed in all its lights, over and over again, with thousandfold repetition; and, beyond question, its depictment in words has been attempted still oftener than with the pencil. It will be worth while to go back to America, were it only for the chance of finding a still virgin scene.

  London, November 1857

  I do not mean to attempt another description of Westminster Abbey, after at least two or three in reference to former visits. I am not aware that I had any new sensation, though I was strongly impressed with the perception that very common place people compose the great bulk of society in this home of the illustrious dead. It is wonderful how few names there are that one cares anything about, a hundred years after their departure; but perhaps each generation acts in good faith, in canonizing its own men. It is pleasant to think of Westminster Abbey as incrusted all over, in its interior, with marble immortalities; but, looking at them more closely, you find that the fame of the buried person does not make the marble live, but the marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man, who needs a monument, ever ought to have one. Of all the sculptures, I took particular notice only of the statue of Wilberforce, which is certainly very queer indeed. The man seems to have sunk into himself, in a sitting posture, with one thin leg crossed over the other, a book in one hand, and the other, I think, under his chin, or applied to some such familiar use; and his face twinkles at you with a shrewd complacency, as if he were looking into your eyes and twigged something there. I have no doubt the image is as like him as one pea to another; and being in modern costume, you might fancy that he had seen the Gorgon’s Head, at some instant when he was in his most familiar mood, and had forthwith become stone. It shows, by its ludicrous effect, the impropriety of bestowing the age-long duration of marble upon small, characteristic individualities; the subject should be taken in a mood of broad and grand composure, which would cause all trifling peculiarities to disappear. I really felt as if the statue were impertinent, staring me in the face with that knowing complication of wrinkles; and I should have liked to fling a brick-bat right at its nose, or to have broken off the foot that dangled over its knee.

  London, December 1857

  All these days, since my last date, have been marked by nothing very well worthy of detail and description. I have walked the streets a great deal, in the dull November days, and always take a certain pleasure in being in the midst of human life—as closely encompassed by it as it is possible to be, anywhere in this world; and, in that way of viewing it, there is a dull and sombre enjoyment always to be had in Holborn, Fleet-street, Cheap-side, and the other thronged parts of London. It is human life; it is this material world; it is a grim and heavy reality. I have never had the same sense of being surrounded by materialisms, and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly life, anywhere else; these broad, thronged streets are so evidently the veins and arteries of an enormous city. London is evidenced in every one of them, just as a Megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if they be small ones. Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life, to wander through these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking aspect of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me, wearisome cabs and omnibusses; everywhere, the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud that serves London for a sky;—in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness, and, at this season, always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness. It is strange how little splendor and brilliancy one sees in London-streets; in the city, almost none, though some in the shops of Regent-street.

  . . .

  I went to Marlborough House, to look at the English pictures, which I care more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists, because the latter will be found more numerously, and better, on the Continent. I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed me very strongly. Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of gifts. To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exists only for connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious affair. I looked at all Turner’s pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them. Even those few are tantalizing. At a certain distance, you discern what appears to be a grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely if you can get within the range of distinct vision. You come nearer, and find only blotches of color, and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it. There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dream-land, seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight if looked upon with wide-open eyes. These were the most satisfactory specimens. There were many others which I positively could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not even so far as to guess whether they purported to represent earth, sea, or sky. In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at all, but should have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on the canvass, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paints, and now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color, without particularly intending it. Now that I have done my best to understand them without an interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin’s pamphlet at my next visit, and look at them through his eyes. But I do not think I can be driven out of the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the spectator sees in Nature.

  Rome, February 1858

  To-day has been very rainy. I went out in the forenoon, and took a sitting at Miss Lander’s studio, she having done me the honor to request me to sit for my bust. Her rooms are those formerly occupied by Canova; the one where she models being large, high, and dreary, from the want of carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor’s studio has not the picturesque charm of a painter’s, where there is color, warmth, cheerfulness, and where the artist continually turns towards you the glow of some picture which is resting against the wall. Miss Lander is from my own native town, and appears to have genuine talent, and spirit and independence enough to give it fair play. She is living here quite alone, in delightful freedom, and has sculptured two or three things that may probably make her favorably known. “Virginia Dare” is certainly very beautiful. During the sitting, I talked a good deal with Miss Lander, being a little inclined to take a similar freedom with her moral likeness to that which she was taking with my physical one. There are very available points about her and her position; a young woman, living in almost perfect independence, thousands of miles from her New England home, going fearlessly about these mysterious streets, by night as well as by day, with no household ties, no rule or law but that within her: yet acting with quietness and simplicity, and keeping, after all, within a homely line of right. In her studio, she wears a sort of pea-jacket, buttoned across her breast, and a little foraging-cap, just covering the top of her head. She asked me not to look at the bust at the close of
the sitting, and, of course, I obeyed: though I have a vague idea of a heavy-browed physiognomy, something like what I have seen in the glass, but looking strangely in that guise of clay. Miss Lander has become strongly attached to Rome, and says that, when she dreams of home, it is merely of paying a short visit, and coming back before her trunk is unpacked. This is a strange fascination that Rome exercises upon artists; there is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, and heads to model; and ideas may be made sensible objects at home as well as here. I think it is the peculiar mode of life, and its freedom from the enthralments of society, more than the artistic advantages which Rome offers; and then, no doubt, though the artists care little about one another’s works, yet they keep one another warm by the presence of so many of them.

  . . .

  But we passed hastily by this, and almost all the other pictures, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous.—These are Raphael’s Fornarini, and Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci. These we found in the last of the three rooms; and as regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything, for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else I have known. It is a very youthful, girlish, perfectly beautiful face, with white drapery all around it, and quite enveloping the form. One or two locks of auburn hair stray out. The eyes are large and brown, and meet those of the spectator; and there is, I think, a little red about the eyelids, but it is very slightly indicated. The whole face is perfectly quiet; no distortion nor disturbance of any single feature; nor can I see why it should not be cheerful, nor why an imperceptible touch of the painter’s brush should not suffice to brighten it into joyousness. Yet it is the very saddest picture that ever was painted, or conceived; there is an unfathomable depth and sorrow in the eyes; the sense of it comes to you by a sort of intuition. It is a sorrow that removes her out of the sphere of humanity; and yet she looks so innocent, that you feel as if it were only this sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that keeps her down upon the earth and brings her within our reach at all. She is like a fallen angel, fallen, without sin. It is infinitely pitiful to meet her eyes, and feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; not that she appeals to you for help and comfort, but is more conscious than we can be that there is none in reserve for her. It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, or could do it again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted better than he knew. I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for no doubt we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of the picture.

  . . .

  On reaching the hither side of the river, I soon struck upon the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus, which are very picturesque, and the more so from being close linked in—indeed, identified—with the shops, habitations, and swarming life of modern Rome. The most striking portion was a circular edifice, which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric; many of the antique pillars being yet perfect, but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the church of San Gregorio. All along, I saw massive ruins, not particularly picturesque or beautiful, but huge, mountainous piles chiefly of brickwork, somewhat weed-grown, here and there, but oftener bare and dreary. For Nature does not take a Roman ruin to her heart as she does the old feudal castles and abbeys of England, covering them up with ivy as tenderly as Robin Redbreast covered the dead babes with leaves. Besides, all the successive ages, since Rome began to decay, have done their best to ruin the very ruins by taking away the marble and the hewn stone for their own structures, and leaving only the inner filling-up of brick-work, which the ancient architects never designed to be seen. The consequence of all this is that except for the lofty and poetical associations connected with it—and except, too, for the immense difference in magnitude—a Roman ruin may be in itself not more picturesque than I have seen an old cellar, with a shattered brick chimney half crumbling down into it, in New England.

  Rome, April 1858

  The same evening we went to Monte Cavallo, where, from the gateway of the Pontifical Palace, we saw the illumination of St Peter’s. Mr. Akers, the sculptor, had recommended this position to us, and accompanied us thither, as the best point from which the illumination could be witnessed, at a distance, without the incommodity of such a crowd as would be assembled at the Pincian. The first illumination (the Silver one, as it is called,) was very grand and delicate, describing the outline of the great edifice and crowning dome, in light; while the daylight was not yet wholly departed. As my wife finely remarked, it seemed like the glorified spirit of the church made visible; or, as I will add, it looked as this famous and never-to-be-forgotten structure will look, to the imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin—the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the back-ground of the night of time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it look on paper.

  Rome, May 1858

  This morning, I wandered, for the thousandth time, through some of the narrow intricacies of Rome, stepping here and there into a church. I do not know the name of the first one; nor had it anything remarkable here; though, till I came to Rome, I was not aware that any such churches existed—a marble pavement, in variegated compartments; a series of shrines and chapels, round the whole floor of the church, each with its own adornment of sculpture and pictures, its own altar, with tall wax tapers before it, some of which were burning; a great picture over the high altar; the whole interior of the church ranged round with pillars and pilasters, and lined, every inch of it, with rich yellow marble, or an excellent imitation of it; finally, a frescoed cieling over the nave and transepts, and a dome rising high over the central part, and filled with frescoes, wrought to such perspective illusion that the edges seem to project into the air. Two or three persons are kneeling at separate shrines; there are several wooden confessionals placed against the walls, at one of which kneels a lady, confessing to a priest who sits within; the tapers are lighted at the high altar, and at one of the shrines; an attendant is scrubbing the marble pavement with a broom and water—a process, I should think, seldom practised in most of the Roman churches. By and by, the lady finishes her confession, kisses the priest’s hand, and sits down in one of the chairs which are set about the floor; while the priest (in a black robe, with a short, loose, white jacket over his shoulders) disappears by a side-door out of the church. I, likewise, finding nothing attractive in the pictures, take my departure. But, really, to good Catholics, it must be a blessed convenience—this facility of finding a cool, quiet, silent, beautiful place of worship in even the hottest and most bustling street, into which they may step, leaving the fret and trouble of the world at the threshold, purifying themselves with a touch of holy water as they enter, and kneeling down to hold communion with some saint, their awful friend; or perhaps confessing all their sins to a priest, laying the whole dark burthen at the foot of the cross, and coming forth in the freshness and elasticity of innocence. It is for Protestants to inquire whether some of these inestimable advantages are not compatible with a purified faith, and do not indeed belong to Christianity, making part of the blessings it was meant to bring. It would be a good time to suggest and institute some of them, now that the American public seems to be stirred by a Revival, hitherto unexampled in extent. Protestantism needs a new Apostle to convert it into something positive.

  Florence, June 1858

  Right opposite Petrarch’s birth-house—and it must have been the well whence
the water was drawn that first bathed him—stands, or lies, or whatever is the phrase for a hollow place, a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories, I forget which. It is surrounded with a stone-curb octagonal in shape, and evidently as ancient as Boccacio’s time; it has a wooden cover, through which is a square opening, and, looking down, I saw my own face in the water far beneath. There is no familiar object, connected with daily life, so interesting as a well; and this well of old Arrezzo, whence Petrarch had drunk, around which he had played in his boyhood, and which Boccaccio has made famous, really interested me more than the Cathedral. It lies right under the pavement of the street, under the sunshine, without any shade of trees about it, or any grass, except a little that grows in the crevices of its stones; but the shape of its stonework would make it a pretty object in an engraving. As I lingered round it, I thought of my own Town Pump, in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio’s well. Oh, certainly not; but yet I made that humble Town-Pump the most celebrated structure in the good town; a thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen, or fill their teakettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score.